An asteroid the size of six football pitches will accelerate on Earth on Saturday night

By
Rex Rose
An asteroid the size of six football pitches will accelerate on Earth on Saturday night

Asteroid 2002 NN4 will go to Earth on Saturday at 11:20 pm ET, NASA says. At an estimated diameter of up to 1,870 feet, second at the Center for Near Earth Object Studies, it will certainly look great.

But it will be about 3.2 million miles from our planet, 13 times farther than the moon, NASA says, so there’s really no reason to worry.

And these types of events are quite normal. Last August, an asteroid was roughly the same size as the 2002 NN4 that passed from Earth, and experts at the time called it moderate in size.

And this asteroid is less than a mile long. The largest known asteroid orbiting the sun is 21 miles long, Lindley Johnson of NASA’s planetary defense coordination office last year at CNN.

However, the probability of an asteroid actually hitting Earth is rather low – it occurs once every two or three centuries, Johnson said at the time.

In 2013, a meteor of only 55 feet in diameter crossed the Earth’s atmosphere over Russia. The meteor had no impact on the planet, but the explosion still injured more than 1.00 people.

Being millions of miles away, this should not be the case with the 2002 NN4. So you can spend the Saturday night relaxing, knowing that an asteroid doesn’t actually come to destroy us. At least today.

The next time 2002 NN4 will be so close to us is in June 2029.

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